The Unlikely Guardian
by The Heartless Wanderer
Summary: High-school detective Shinichi Kudo had once believed that his situation couldn't get any weirder or more hopeless than it already was... but that was before he found himself stranded in this strange world called Spira. Now he must employ all of his wit and skill to protect a woman who might just end a millennium-old cycle of death and destruction once and for all...
1. I: Lost and Confused

**Full Summary: **High-school detective Shinichi Kudo had believed, for the longest time, that his situation could not possibly get any weirder. He had believed for the longest time that it could never get any more hopeless. That was when he was force-fed an experimental poison which transformed his teenage body into that of a first-grader.

It was also before he found himself stranded in this strange world called Spira.

Now, trapped in a world where the standard rules of logic no longer apply, the shrunken detective must employ all of his wits, wiles, and soccer skills in the defense of one burdened with the duty of protecting the world from an immortal terror. But just how much can a "child" really do? And even if he _did _have his original body, what use is a detective in world of magic and monsters?

* * *

**The Interference Reports – File #2  
****THE UNLIKELY GUARDIAN  
**by  
The Heartless Wanderer

**- V -**

**Disclaimer: **_Detective Conan_ belongs to Gosho Aoyama and all related publishers, anime companies, and whatnot. The _Final Fantasy _franchise is the property of Square Enix. All related concepts and characters belong to their respective copyright holders. The Heartless Wanderer only claims ownership of the fanfiction itself, and is making no monetary profit through its publication on the Internet. (If you for some reason paid to read this, you got ripped off.)

Alexander Karsath, the overall concept of _The Interference_, and related concepts and characters are the intellectual property of Newbie-Spud (utilized and/or referenced by this story with his permission, of course).

* * *

**~ I ~  
"Lost and Confused"**

* * *

Shinichi Kudo was cold, bone-cold. Not only that, he felt like he was floating. His first thought was that death felt like utter shit, but at least the cushions were soft…

And then a voice startled him awake:

"Hey! Kid! Are you alright?"

This was followed by a sloshing sound and then the distinct splashing rhythm that the young detective associated with a perfect breast-stroke. High-school detective Shinichi Kudo — or rather, Conan Edogawa the extremely observant first-grader — opened his eyes to find his glasses totally misted over… and realized that he was floating on his back in ice-cold water.

"GAAAAAAAAH! THAT'S FREEZING!" he screamed, jerking upright in the water so fast as to induce whiplash… and then dropping like a stone beneath the water's surface. No sooner had the water swallowed his hair than a strong arm roughly yanked him back up, teeth chattering and eyes wide with shock and bewilderment, glasses askew. His head snapped left, right, up, down, and then he gazed in shock at his rescuer: a man whose blonde hair stuck out in two directions as if he were still floating under the water, wearing an odd sort of yellow-and-black shirt in a style that Conan had never seen in his life, clutching Conan in one hand and the hilt of a long, vicious-looking red sword in the other.

"_Yikes!_" Conan exclaimed, reflexively trying to jerk away from the crazy-haired man with the limb-dicing murder weapon in his hand, but the stranger held fast.

"Whoa, whoa, _whoa_, kid, I gotcha!" he said. Then, following Conan's bugged-out eyes to the sword in his hand, he added, "And I'm not going to chop your head off! Just calm down, man!"

Eyes still warily darting back and forth between the man and his sword, Conan attempted to still himself. "Th-thanks," he chattered, now only shivering with cold. "I… wh-where am I?"

"I was kinda hoping you might be able to tell me," the man said, crestfallen but seemingly unaffected by the chill of the air. "Were you swallowed up by Sin, too?"

Conan, teeth chattering away, only stared blankly at the crazy-haired man with the big, red sword.

"…The big, huge monster of death and destruction that attacked Zanarkand?" prompted the stranger when Conan failed to answer the question.

Conan blinked several times, glanced from the sword to its wielder one last time, and burst into a shaky fit of laughter. "Oh man, oh m-man," he stuttered though his cackles. "Th-this is a dream. I'm in an ambulance or I'm bleeding out on the floor of some god-forsaken cave, dying of a gunshot wound to my abdomen, and I'm dreaming about some lunatic with a sword who thinks he survived a giant-monster movie… ahh… ahh… _ACHOO!_ …and now I have a cold… glorious."

The man had a sour look on his face, but seemed to remember their current predicament at Conan's sneeze. "Ah… let's get out of this water and start over," he suggested. "Can you swim, or do I need to carry you?"

"I c-can swim j-just fine," Conan replied, still chortling in a frantic kind of way. To prove his point, the little detective struggled out of the man's grip, looked around, and set off across the water at brisk pace for a nearby set of stone steps. His eyes flitted left and right as he swam, taking in the submerged ruins. There were collapsed pillars and eroded stone structures wherever he looked. The place might have been a fantasy-adventure dungeon in the aftermath of orbital bombardment.

Cliché it might have been, but a tired-out old movie quote floated through Conan's mind as he climbed, shivering, onto the stone steps and out of the water: _Toto, I don't think we're in Kansai anymore._

Well. The thought was a touch "localized," but the essence was just as hackneyed; that's all that mattered in the end.

At the same time Conan thought this, he heard another splash behind him and turned his head wearily to find that the crazy-haired man had stepped out of the water behind him.

"Well, _this _is just great," grumbled the man. "You okay, kid? You don't look like you're used to swimming in these kinda temperatures…"

"That's 'c-cause I'm — aah — I'm — _achoo! _…not," Conan tried to retort, but only wound up sneezing out in shivering bits and pieces. He looked himself over ruefully; his shirt, shorts, and jacket were all soaked. He supposed he should count his blessings that he hadn't been wearing his voice-modulator bowtie; that was the only gadget he wore on his person that wasn't made to be waterproof. He would have to check the tracking and listening devices in his glasses, but those were made to last. Realizing what he'd forgotten, he unbuttoned his front coat pocket and sighed in relief… the tracking stickers were still there.

But in the process of checking his pocket for the tracker, he had lifted his jacket to reveal the shirt underneath — and at the sight, the blonde-haired man let out a noise of alarm. "Hey, kid! Were you bleeding? Your shirt looks like it was drenched in blood!"

Conan realized with a start that he _had _been bleeding, and badly! In a panic, he lifted the shirt to check the wound, but —

"N-no w-way!" he shivered, eyes round as dinner-plates behind his dripping glasses. The skin of his stomach was unmarred, not a hint or sign that a bullet had ever pierced it. He reached behind and felt at his lower back, which told the same tale. The half washed-out blood in his shirt and the small bullet-sized exit hole bore mute testimony to the fatal injury, but the wound itself was gone as if it had never been at all.

"Kid?" the man asked in worry, hunkering down for a closer look at Conan's exposed stomach.

"I-I was shot, but," said Conan, "it's g-gone, the w-wound is gone!"

"Whoa," the man said in awe, standing up. "Well, that's good, right?"

"Of course it's good!" Conan burst out. "B-but how — why?"

The man shrugged. "Maybe someone used healing magic on it?" he suggested, and Conan was astonished to find no hint of jest in the man's voice. Conan gaped, arms folded over his chest and rubbing his shoulders as his teeth chattered once more.

"R-right," he said. "Healing magic. A w-wizard did it. L-let's just… go with that. For now. Until we're out of the c-cold."

"Right you are!" the man cheered, punching a half-hearted fist into the air as he ascended the short staircase and stepped onto the ruins before them. "Let's get moving, find a way out of this place. Then we can find someone and catch a ride back to Zanarkand!"

"What the hell is a Zanarkand?" mumbled Conan. The man shot him a startled look.

"A kid your age shouldn't be using that kinda language," he admonished, and Conan blushed a bit beneath the redness the cold had brought out. Then: "Wait, you don't know what Zanarkand is? Aren't you _from _Zanarkand?"

"I'm from Beika City," Conan said. "Japan," he added as an afterthought, wondering just how far away from home this place really was.

"Huh," the man said. "I've never heard of Beika City _or_ Japan."

Conan's blood froze. Beika he could understand, but to have never heard of Japan? And the man was speaking fluent Japanese! Could he be having him on — ? No, that seemed unlikely. They were both lost in these odd ruins, and like him, this man seemed to have no idea where they were, or how they got there… aside from the delusion of having been swallowed by Godzilla's mentally-impaired former roommate, that is. Aside from that, he seemed to hail from a city or country that Conan had never even heard of, and Conan knew the names of a lot of cities.

"Anyway, I'm Tidus!" the man introduced himself, lifting an arm in spirited greeting. The other still held the hilt of that sword, its blade angled behind him. Standing there at full height and out of the water, Conan noted that the man's clothes were even _more _outlandish than his shirt suggested. The pants were a weird sort of asymmetrical style, one leg longer than the other, and the arm not grasping the sword was covered by a strange padded gauntlet that looked more like some freakish form of sporting equipment than actual armor. There was a large, unfamiliar reddish symbol on the longer pant leg, which also dangled from his neck in the form of a metal pendant, and he wore a black leather glove on his un-gauntleted hand. His shoes were yellow and he wore black ankle-socks.

The most peculiar aspect of this ensemble was that each and every piece of it seemed to be designed for underwater wear.

"I'm C-Conan," said the detective, willing himself to stop shivering so much, but still needing to rub at his shoulders for whatever warmth he could generate. "Conan Edogawa."

"Edogawa?" said Tidus curiously. "Strange name. Anyway, stick close, kiddo. I'll get us outta here."

While inwardly he resented being coddled like a first-grader, Conan had to admit having a full-grown adult with a really big sword to protect him might not be such a bad thing. Glancing again at said blade as he trotted along behind Tidus, the little detective asked, "Do you know how to use that?"

"Ah…" Tidus said, rubbing awkwardly at the back of his wild haircut. "Not, y'know, the right way, or anything. But I don't think I did so bad against those weird fiends that Sin shot out. It's not as hard to pick up swordplay as I thought it would be. Or maybe I'm just awesome like that!"

Conan's face assumed that sort of half-amused, half-exasperated look he usually reserved for Kogoro Mouri. Great. Just great. So the man's only experience with the weapon in his hand was limited to a Godzilla-inspired fever dream…

Conan's thoughts turned to the last thing he could remember before waking up in this strange place with his bullet-wound miraculously healed. He had been on a camping trip with the Detective Boys, a camping trip turned sour when they had stumbled smack onto the scene of a crime-in-progress. Three bank-robbers had murdered a fourth, and had attempted to shoot the Detective Boys dead where they stood for daring to witness their attempts to hide the body. Conan had taken a bullet to his abdomen as they ran, and had spent the rest of their time in that cave on Genta's back, trying to help his friends solve a strange riddle that had been left in the cave, a riddle that had led to the exit…

He had been held hostage at the end, when the cops had cornered the robbers at the cave's exit, but Conan had one-upped the evil-doer with a tranquilizer dart to the face. God, but he loved his watch…

Wait.

Conan frowned. Hadn't he left his glasses behind in the cave, in order to leave a message for Haibara and Dr. Agasa…? And hadn't that message involved leaving his tracking stickers, as well? Yet he had them all on his person… was he remembering wrong?

The two continued on in silence: ahead lay a long, makeshift-looking stone catwalk suspended high over yet more water that was doubtless cold as the deepest pits of Hell. Conan would have broken out in goosebumps at the thought of trusting their fates to the integrity of a bridge that looked on the brink of crumbling to pieces… but he was already covered in goosebumps from his recent swim.

Tidus must have been thinking along the same lines, for he glanced nervously back at Conan and slowed his pace, taking slower, more measured steps.

And then the stone beneath their feet gave an almighty lurch.

Conan sighed. "Here we go…" he muttered, bracing himself as Tidus snapped his head back to Conan with a look of panic — and before Conan could object, Tidus scooped the detective up into one arm and jumped off the side of the bridge… just before the bridge itself fell to pieces beneath them.

The two hit the water with a hard splash, Conan clutching his glasses to his face with his eyes shut tight, nose burning from the sudden influx of water. Behind them, Conan heard the muffled splashings he knew to be huge chunks of stone joining them in the ice-cold drink. Tidus released Conan and the two swam hard for the surface — Tidus gasping for air and Conan hacking and spluttering when they got there.

"I — _hack _— could've taken care of myself!" snapped Conan.

"Well, excuse _me_, princess!" Tidus retorted, shooting Conan an annoyed look that quickly changed to an alert one. Tidus looked around, as if he'd heard something, but Conan only watched his companion with an utterly nonplussed expression on his face.

Until the monster leapt out of the water. Then it became an expression of terror.

It was a huge yellow-and-orange fish… with legs and arms, and teeth, lots of little sharp teeth, oh, and mad, ravenous eyes. And no sooner had it jumped over their heads than two more emerged from the water after it, soaring above them from two different directions, and Conan realized with horror that he was surrounded by _sea monsters._

Sea monsters!

The thought froze him more effectively than the water ever could have, but he was snapped back to reality by Tidus's panicked yell of "Hold your breath, kid!"

Conan took a hasty breath and held it, just in time to get dragged under by Tidus, who was pulling him along with the sword-free arm; the other grasped the hilt of that red blade, and he was swimming at a fantastic pace considering he only had his feet to propel himself with. Conan squinted his eyes against the water, desperately looking to and fro, from one monster to the next. The beasts circled them like vultures. As they fled, one of the fish-man things, which was at least the size of Tidus himself, rocketed through the water at them —

And Tidus swerved around, releasing Conan's arm, to deliver a single slash with his blade that lopped the creature's left arm right off.

What happened next surprised Conan more than anything else that had happened since he'd woken up, more even than the appearance of the monsters themselves. As the monster writhed in agony, Tidus delivered a second, downward sword swipe, cleaving it in two… and instead of coming apart, the creature exploded into a cluster of floating _lights_.

Conan could only stare at first, but then the second fish-man went for him. Barely restraining himself from releasing his held breath in a bubbly yelp, Conan jerked out of the way, just barely evading the fish-man's swiping claw. Adrenaline overpowering his terror, Conan lifted up his right leg and turned the dial on the side of his sneaker, hoping — _praying_ — that this would work underwater.

The third fish-man made a beeline for Conan. Tidus attempted to place himself between it and the detective, but found himself busied with fending off the other monster. And as the third reached Conan, Conan whipped around in an underwater roundhouse kick.

His foot found its mark: right between the creature's eyes. The fish-man's head snapped violently back. Its body went limp and drifted past on pure inertia… and then it, too, exploded into a cluster of lights.

Conan caught an amazed, relieved glance from Tidus, who at that moment managed to catch the final creature with a powerful thrust to the abdomen. Tidus flashed Conan a grin and a thumbs-up. Conan returned the gesture, but as they both made to swim for the surface, a gargantuan shadow stirred to Conan's left.

Conan's breath escaped in one big, bubbly burst as he attempted to scream and choked himself in the process. Another sea monster, a _massive _sea monster, this not the size of a man but a bunk bed, was swimming out at them, and it was like nothing Conan had ever seen before. The fish-men had some anthromorphic features, but this creature was like nothing less than an eyeless sea-bird with curved, club-like arms and a bulbous organic cage for a stomach. Water clogging his windpipe, Conan rushed to cover the last few feet between him and the surface… while out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tidus turn to face the beast.

He burst from the water and gasped for air, coughed, and looked around desperately for any means of escape — and then he saw it!

Sucking in a huge breath, Conan ducked beneath the water again and, clutching his glasses securely to his face, he attempted to catch Tidus's attention by waving his arms and pointing as energetically and obviously as he could at the tunnel he had spotted in the wall of the drowned ruin.

Tidus glanced in that direction, his eyes widened in realization, and then he took a heavy sucker punch to the shoulder for his trouble: the monster had reached him and taken a wild swing with its club-like limb. Flipping backward through the water and using the momentum of the monster's attack to his advantage, Tidus swam as hard as he could for the tunnel — Conan making for it at the same time.

Conan was closer, but Tidus was faster. They reached it at exactly the same time… and the next moment, so did the monster. Its maw opened wide, it began to suck in the water around them like a vacuum. Tidus swam as hard as he could, Conan clutched the man 'round the waist like a lifeline…

And then the monster exhaled with all the force of a raging hurricane, and the two were washed away into the tunnel. Conan continued to clutch at his glasses, the world rushing by in a watery blur, until something collided with his skull and the watery blur turned pitch-black.

* * *

**Author's Note: **For those who are either unfamiliar with the _Detective Conan/Case Closed_ manga or who don't feel like looking it up, this story picks up after the end of Volume 25.

**Author's Note #2:** Since the start of my _Chrono Cross_ OC-insert fanfic, _Where Angels Lose Their Way_, I've altered my plans slightly to tie this story in with that one… eventually, like, _way_ further down the line. As such, _The Unlikely Guardian_ now bears the heading _The Interference Reports - File #2_. Despite that, this is not actually a sequel to the first "file," as it takes place at roughly the same time and does not depend on any direct connection to its counterpart for plot progression.


	2. II: Whatever Remains

**Disclaimer: **_Detective Conan_ belongs to Gosho Aoyama and all related publishers, anime companies, and whatnot. The _Final Fantasy _franchise is the property of Square Enix. All related concepts and characters belong to their respective copyright holders. The Heartless Wanderer only claims ownership of the fanfiction itself, and is making no monetary profit through its publication on the Internet. (If you for some reason paid to read this, you got ripped off.)

Alexander Karsath, the overall concept of _The Interference_, and related concepts and characters are the intellectual property of Newbie-Spud (utilized and/or referenced by this story with his permission, of course).

* * *

**~ II ~  
"Whatever Remains"**

* * *

_Ugh…_

Conan's head was throbbing. He reached up and rubbed at it, unsurprised to find that the dull ache was emitting from a lump at the back of his cranium. It seemed he'd hit his head when the bad guy had dropped him… but the bullet wound wasn't hurting anymore. In fact, he didn't even feel like he'd been shot at all. The doctors at this hospital must be — totally… er… awesome…

His groggy train of thought trailed off the rails entirely as he sat up and opened his eyes, looking around the small, cramped room he had been laid to rest in. As he sat up, a blanket several times his size slid down his torso and he realized he had been sleeping in a cot. He felt distinctly uncomfortable and realized he was wearing a heavy, leathery outfit that was made for a body twice his height; his shorts, shirt, and jacket were nowhere to be seen, but his glasses were sitting on a small bedside crate along with his watch, and his sneakers were on the floor next to the crate. The room had no windows to speak of, only a single door. The door was closed, but there was a subtle swaying motion to the place… Conan knew right away that he was on a ship or boat of some kind. He tried to figure out how he'd gotten from that cave to here, and then he remembered the monsters in the ruins.

Gingerly, he laid back down, closed his eyes, and tried to deny it.

And could anyone blame him? Shinichi Kudo was a _detective_. Logic and truth had to go hand in hand for that to even work — and logic had some pretty far-out things to say about his situation, provided his memory of those weird ruins was telling the truth.

_Waking up in an unfamiliar place with an unfamiliar man clad in unfamiliar clothes. _The clothes were the relevant detail there, a style that Conan had never seen anywhere in the world (and as Shinichi, he'd done a fair bit of traveling on his parents' yen, so he'd seen a lot of the world and quite a few of the world's clothing quirks).

_Said unfamiliar man comes from an unfamiliar location and spoke of healing magic as if referring to last night's weather forecast._ _And he had a sword, crafted in a style I'm pretty sure no country on Earth has ever smithed swords in._ The sword just helped the case put forth by the clothes, really… for the time being, Conan didn't even want to think about the implications of this man's belief in healing magic.

_Said unfamiliar place plays host to unfamiliar wildlife — which happens to include giant fish-man things and one really _big _son of a —! _

The door clicked, and Conan's head snapped to the side to look at it. Someone had unlocked it from the outside. Conan had only a second to wonder whether he should feign sleep until he was sure of his captive's intentions, but before he'd properly considered the notion, the door swung open and in walked a woman in a most deliciously tight wetsuit, carrying a tray of the most delicious-smelling food imaginable. Or so it seemed to Conan at the time; he realized the instant he smelled it that he was starving.

"_Ur, oui'na ymnayto yfyga!_" the woman exclaimed, her face splitting into a bright, relieved smile. Then the smile faltered. "_E… tuh'd cibbuca oui lyh cbayg Al Bhed, lyh oui?_"

Conan sat up, salivating at the smell of the food tray in the woman's hand — the food, too, was unfamiliar, but Conan was even more captivated by this woman's eyes… the pupils were spiral-patterned. Conan was sure that if anyone had eyes like that anywhere on Earth, he would have heard about it before now. Another nail in the coffin of his sanity.

"_Lyh oui…?_" the woman asked again, sounding less hopeful this time.

"Er…" Conan mumbled, trying to think of what the woman must be saying. He knew a bit about what quite a few languages sound like, and actually could speak English quite well (albeit with an embarrassingly thick "Engrish" accent), but this language was one he'd never heard of, too. Another nail in the coffin…

"I…" Conan started. "Um… yes, I'm fine, and, uh, no, I don't speak… whatever language that is."

"Oh, poopie," the woman sighed in perfect Japanese (and she didn't even have a foreign-sounding accent; she spoke as if she'd been born smack in the middle of Tokyo). "I guess it was too much to hope for. Your friend didn't seem to understand us at all, either."

"My friend?" Conan echoed dully, and then it clicked. "Oh. Um, blonde hair? Weird clothes, black-and-yellow? Big, red sword?"

"Yup!" chirped the woman. "He's up on deck, though. Still hasn't come to. I kinda had to knock him out just to get Brother and the guys to let him on board at all. Everyone thought he might be a fiend in human disguise. We weren't expecting to find anything but Sahagin and crumbled rock in the old Baaj Temple. I'm Rikku, by the way — what's your name?"

"Conan, Conan Edogawa," replied the detective, automatically offering his hand — which Rikku stared at uncomprehendingly for a few seconds until Conan dropped it. "Um, sorry. We… shake hands, where I come from. It's a greeting, like saying, 'pleased to meet you.'"

"Oh," Rikku said. "I've never heard of a village with that custom. Are you… a Yevonite? Maybe an Al Bhed hater?" she added, with a bit of trepidation.

"Yevonite?" Conan asked. "Al Bhed hater?" _And why "village" rather than "city" or "country?"_ he thought but didn't ask.

"A follower of Yevon? You know, Maesters and summoners and 'Oh my Yevon, those evil Al Bhed heathens and their big, bad machina!'"

"I've never even _heard _of Yevon… _or _Al Bhed."

Rikku just gawked at him, but then his eyes drifted to the food in her hand and she caught on when he licked his lips. "Oops!" she laughed, and held out the tray for him to take. There was small fork instead of chopsticks. "Right, the interrogation can wait. You must be starving! How long were you in those ruins for, anyway?"

Conan bunched up his overlong sleeves over his forearms, then took the tray gratefully and went straight for the meat. It was an unusual color and had the texture of ground beef but tasted oddly like a combination of chicken and turkey. "I'm not really sure," he said once he'd swallowed his first mouthful. "I was in this cave with some friends… we ran into some trouble, a bunch of bad guys trying to hide a murder victim's body, and I got shot when we tried to run. I remember we made it to the exit before I passed out, but —" Unable to resist, Conan shoveled down another bite of the ground-beef-chicken-turkey stuff. "— but when I came to, I was floating in water in some old ruin and my gunshot wound was healed."

"Oh, so you _had _been shot," Rikku said, unsurprised. "I was wondering about that. There were blood and bullet-holes in your shirt, but the only injury you had was a bump to the head. You had a pretty bad concussion, but nothing a few potions couldn't sort out."

Conan began to nod but stopped at the word "potions." He blinked in astonishment, but was even more taken aback by what Rikku said next:

"By the way, cool glasses! Tracking and listening bugs, all in one! You're lucky I spotted it before the guys did, they'd have confiscated all of this stuff and you'd never have seen them again."

Conan's jaw dropped as Rikku reached into a pouch at her side and withdraw a handful of Conan's own tracking stickers, depositing them on the table next to his glasses.

"The watch is pretty nifty, too," she added, smiling conspiratorially at Conan. "Spring-loaded to launch little poisoned darts. Nothing _too _strong, I hope. It's really clever, hiding a forbidden machina in one of the few machina that Yevon actually lets people use."

Conan blushed and tried to stutter out a response, but Rikku waved him off. "It's okay, we Al Bhed don't buy all that machina-are-evil nonsense! I just wanted to ask you who made these, they're awesome! …And for the life of me, I can't figure what the shoes are supposed to do," she added as an afterthought, glancing with confusion at the sneakers by the crate. Conan busied himself with another mouthful of turkey-chicken and didn't immediately answer.

"They increase my kicking power," he said at last, when Rikku continued to watch him expectantly. "I mainly use them for taking down… er, fiends…" (He gathered that 'fiends' were the sort of monsters he'd encountered just prior to his concussion) "…because I can't do much by myself with this kiddy body, can I?"

"They can do that?" Rikku said in awe, now eying the sneakers as if longing to take them apart and find out what made them tick. "Ooh, that's so cool! Shoes that can make even a kid your age into a fiend-busting badass, huh? Now I really wanna know who made those."

"They were made by Dr. Agasa back home, in Japan," Conan said with a fond smile. "Most of his inventions blow up in his face, but he's made me lotsa cool gadgets like these. I also have a solar-powered skateboard, but I left that at home."

"I've never heard of Japa— Solar-powered?" Rikku changed tack abruptly as Conan's words fully registered, and quirked her head to one side.

"Powered by sunlight," Conan clarified. Rikku's eyes lit up with wonder.

"You're having me on!" she accused, pointing a finger in his face with no real heat. "Sunlight for a power source? Really?"

"Really," laughed Conan. "But it's not perfect. The sun goes down and the thing just stops working. And trust me, the sun can set at _really _awkward moments."

Rikku, of course, had no way of knowing about the previous adventures Conan was alluding to with that comment, so she shrugged and said, "Your clothes should actually be dried off by now. One of the handier machina we have here is a clothes-washing-and-drying device — no more need for tedious hand-washing, and hanging your clothes out to dry overnight is a thing of the past! …Or would be, if convenience weren't a sin according to Yevon." Rikku finished this with such an exaggerated sour pout on her face that Conan had to laugh, despite not really getting the point of the joke. Then he held up an arm to indicate the sleeves that were threatening to flow right on over his hands if he didn't keep them held up high enough.

"Yeah, I could use my clothes back if it's not too much trouble," he said humbly.

"Right! I'll go get 'em! You just wait right here!" Rikku said, and she left the room. She closed the door behind her, but didn't lock it. Conan thought of taking a quick peek outside, but didn't want to risk losing this woman's trust so soon, not when it seemed there was no ill intent. That, and he was too hungry. He had cleaned the tray by the time the woman got back.

"Here you go!" Rikku chirped, opening the door wide and stepping through with a neatly-folded bundle in her arms. At a glance, Conan could tell it was all there. "It took a bit to get all the blood out of the shirt, but apart from the bullet holes, it's good as new! …Can't do much about the bullet holes, unfortunately," Rikku added sheepishly, setting the clothes down on the crate next to Conan's glasses.

"Thanks, and don't worry about the holes," Conan mumbled through his last mouthful of turkey-chicken. He swallowed, set the tray down at the foot of the cot, and let out a sigh of contentment.

"Weird clothes, though," added Rikku thoughtfully. "But really nice! Where'd you get 'em?"

"They're normal where I come from," Conan said with a shrug.

"Right, this 'Japan' village," Rikku said with a nod. So the solar-powered skateboard hadn't _completely _driven that from her mind. "Where exactly is that, if you don't mind my asking?"

"Japan isn't a village, it's a country," Conan said slowly, and then raised his eyebrows in response to Rikku's skeptical look.

"A whole… country?" Rikku asked, her tone one of complete disbelief. "With, like, big cities and lots of people and everything?"

"Yep," Conan answered simply. Rikku continued to stare with a crinkled brow.

"But… with so many people in one place, Sin would never leave Japan alone! How would you keep it at bay?"

There it was a second time, this "Sin" that Tidus had mentioned in the ruins. "And just _what_ is this 'Sin' thing?" Conan asked, a touch impatiently. Rikku now no longer simply stared; she flat-out goggled.

"You don't know what Sin _is_?" Rikku ejaculated, for all the world as though Conan had declared he had been born without a stomach. "Did you hit your head or something?"

Conan's world-famous _you frickin' moron_ look came back with such force that Rikku blushed.

"Oh! Right…" she muttered. "Um… let's see… you don't know what Sin is, you don't know what Al Bhed or Yevon are… you say you come from this whole other country that no one knows about…"

_Yes… yes, put the pieces together…_ Conan thought dully. But Rikku continued to tilt her head left and right, with an actually rather adorable little look of befuddlement coloring her features, until she shrugged, signifying that she had come up from her musings empty.

"Come to think of it, your friend has some weird clothes, too, but they look like a completely different style," Rikku said at length. "Is he from this Japan place, too?"

"Uh, no, I don't think so," Conan said. "He says he's from some place I've never heard of before. Um… I think it was Zanderland or, er, Zarnerkan…"

Rikku blinked. "Surely not… Zanarkand?"

Conan snapped his fingers. "Yeah, that's it! 'Zanarkand.' You've heard of it?"

"I've… heard of it," Rikku said cautiously, "but I know for sure he can't really be from there! I mean, Sin destroyed the whole city over a thousand years ago." Then she frowned worriedly at Conan. "But you don't remember that, either, huh…"

Conan's eyes widened imperceptibly. "Tidus said something about Sin," he said in a voice of dawning comprehension. "He said Sin had attacked Zanarkand… seemed to think it had 'swallowed him up.'"

At that statement, all the blood drained from Rikku's face. She stood frozen in place, a look of horror dawning in her spiral-patterned eyes… and then the next thing Conan knew, she had enveloped him in a bone-crushing hug.

"Oh… oh! You poor boy! I should have guessed sooner!"

She was almost sobbing as she said this. Conan was totally lost, and the feel of two perky breasts squeezed up against his small torso did nothing to help along his cognitive functions, so he just sat there with his arms hanging limply at his sides.

"You were near Sin!" she said. "It must've come to your village and…" She tightened her embrace even more, which Conan at that point hadn't thought possible. "How did you survive? What happened to your parents? Oh, this is horrible! It's always sad when Sin attacks a village, but the orphans are the worst!"

Rikku pulled back, but kept a firm grip on Conan's shoulders and looked him dead in the eye. She looked near tears, and her lower lip was visibly trembling, though she put on a bright smile (for his benefit, Conan assumed). "Don't you worry! Rikku'll look after ya! And if Brother doesn't like it, he can stick it where the sun don't shine! It's a promise, got it?"

"…Huh?" was Conan's intellectual response.

"Oh, sorry, getting ahead of myself," Rikku rambled, releasing Conan and standing back up. She paced back and forth, suddenly full of restless energy, then turned back to Conan and said, "You don't remember anything about Sin, or Yevon, or anything, but if you were in the same place as that guy, it's obvious what really happened. You've been affected by Sin's toxin. When people get to close too Sin, it can mess with their minds… they lose track of who they are, or become violent, or forget things…"

"You're saying I've been poisoned?" Conan said, incredulous. "And everything I remember is just one big hallucination or something?"

"…It looks that way," Rikku said gently. "But don't worry your head about it. The toxin isn't permanent. Everyone gets better eventually… well, as long as Sin or some fiend doesn't kill them first." Rikku bit her lip and asked, "You don't, maybe, remember anything from the attack, do you?"

"I wasn't anywhere near Sin," Conan said flatly. "I couldn't even tell you what Sin _looks _like."

"Do you…" Rikku trailed off, seeming to have some internal debate, then she completed her question: "Do you remember your family at all? Your parents, or whoever took care of you back at your village?"

"My mom and dad live overseas," Conan began without thinking, but before he could say anything else, Rikku let out a happy gasp.

"That means they might still be alive!" she said brightly. "Alright, then! Leave it to me! I'll get you back to your mom and pop, count on it! Do you know where they —"

"_Rikku!_" yelled a thickly-accented voice from somewhere outside the room. From the sound, it was coming from down the hall. "_Xied luttmehk dryd pnyd yht nabund du dra talg! Dra aqlyjydeuh cdyndc eh dah sehidac!_"

Her happy face flashing with indignation so quickly that even Conan had to jump with fright, Rikku whipped around and snarled back at the voice, "_Brother, oui yna cilr y zang! Drec puo fyc yddylgat po Sin, ra haatc ymm dra ramb fa lyh keja!_"

When no reply came, Rikku huffed angrily and glanced back over her shoulder at Conan. "You get dressed and I'll take you up to the deck to see your friend — you said his name was, um, Tidus? He might know something that'll give us more to go on."

"Sure," Conan said. Rikku nodded her assent and left the room, closing the door quietly behind her almost as if she were leaving someone at their death bed. Conan shook his head silently and set about donning his own kiddy-size clothes, brain buzzing and whirring with all of this new information.

He didn't even need to consider that Rikku's diagnosis might be correct; the evidence was irrefutable. Both he and Tidus wore clothes that didn't match the local culture. Conan's shirt was proof enough that he'd been shot exactly as his memory said he had. And even if it could be assumed that the people in this place were capable of making such gadgets as his tracking glasses or stun-gun wristwatch, the fact that Rikku hadn't been able to identify the function of his super sneakers was quite telling. Then there was the sheer vivid detail of his memory, which Conan knew was far too extensive for any toxin-induced hallucination.

Having established that his past memories were real and true, he then only had to remember the very real cold and pain he had suffered since waking up in that drowned temple. If this place was a dream, it was _way _beyond vivid. And yet he had encountered living, breathing sea monsters, creatures that shouldn't have even existed outside of an anime or video game or fantasy-adventure novel. Tidus had spoken of "healing magic" in such a casual manner, as if it were a simple part of daily life and nothing more. And Rikku, Rikku had been _most _informative… informative enough that Conan was sure he had barely scratched the surface when it came to just how different this world's culture was from his own. A religion that seemed to have tabooed most machinery, a society composed of scattered villages instead of larger countries… that strange, unfamiliar Al Bhed language…

For he could no longer deny the truth of the matter. When you eliminate the impossible, after all, whatever remains must be the truth… however improbable.

Conan Edogawa the extremely observant first-grader… or rather, high-school detective Shinichi Kudo… had somehow, some _way_, crossed over into an entirely different world that played by entirely different rules. And Tidus?

_Tidus may be from an entirely different time…_

* * *

**Author's Note: **You might be wondering why I cheesed my way past the rest of the Baaj Temple section by having Conan sleep through it. The answer is simple: I don't want to novelize every little scene that ever plays out in _Final Fantasy X_ and absolutely no progress would have been made during that time that couldn't be made just as easily elsewhere in the story. I also wanted to focus a little more on scenes that don't actually take place during the course of the game, especially at this early stage, because this is very much Conan's story and no one else's. Besides, a lot of fanfiction in this vein tends to start off weak by spending too much time recounting the scenes and dialogue from the games they're based on pretty much verbatim, which makes them a bit dull to read in the beginning when you already know what's going to happen.

It also occurred to me that, because they think Conan is a little boy, the Al Bhed would be less inclined to distrust him than Tidus, and that Conan would initially be cared for inside the ship rather than hung out to dry on the upper deck like Tidus was. So a scene in which Conan wakes up to a tray of yummy choco-beef in Rikku's quarters below deck struck me as a good "exclusive" scene to base a chapter on.

Now, it's easy enough to Google an English-to-Al-Bhed translator program for this kind of thing, but as a courtesy for those who don't care enough to do so on their own, these are the lines of dialogue in Al Bhed, translated for your convenience:

"_Ur, oui'na ymnayto yfyga!_"  
"Oh, you're already awake!"

"_E… tuh'd cibbuca oui lyh cbayg Al Bhed, lyh oui?_"  
"I… don't suppose you can speak Al Bhed, can you?"

"_Lyh oui…?_"  
"Can you…?"

"_Xied luttmehk dryd pnyd yht nabund du dra talg! Dra aqlyjydeuh cdyndc eh dah sehidac!_"  
"Quit coddling that brat and report to the deck! The excavation starts in ten minutes!"

"_Brother, oui yna cilr y zang! Drec puo fyc yddylgat po Sin, ra haatc ymm dra ramb fa lyh keja!_"  
"Brother, you are such a jerk! This boy was attacked by Sin, he needs all the help we can give!"


End file.
